From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68 (21 page)

At the conference at Luca the triumvirs decided to continue to work together and to secure their own futures. Caesar in particular needed considerably more time to complete the reduction of Gaul. This was to be given him, while Pompey and Crassus were to be consuls in 55 and thereafter to have respectively as their provinces the two Spains and Syria. Further, Clodius was to be restrained, Cicero was to be checked, and the task of restoring Ptolemy was to be entrusted to Gabinius.
^23a

Cicero could resist no longer. In a letter to Pompey he recanted and ‘sang his palinode’. Then in the summer he had to make a public statement: in a speech to the Senate
De provinciis consularibus
he supported Caesar’s claim to continue in Gaul and praised his achievements there. In 54 he even suffered the mortification of having to defend Vatinius and Gabinius in the courts. For the next few years he virtually dropped out of politics.
²⁴

After some disturbances and postponement the elections for 55 were finally held, and Pompey and Crassus entered on their second joint consulship. They employed a tribune, C. Trebonius, to propose that the two Spains and Syria should be allotted to the consuls for five years with considerable military powers, and that Pompey should have the right to administer his
Spanish provinces through legates so that he himself could stay near Rome. Despite opposition from two tribunes and from Cato, whom Pompey by exercising his augural authority had prevented from standing for the praetorship, the bill was carried. In addition to some lesser legislation the two consuls sponsored a
lex Licinia Pompeia
to prolong Caesar’s proconsular command in both Gauls and Illyricum for five years until late in 50 (November?) or early 49.
²⁵
Also a measure probably was carried by five tribunes (
lex Mamilia Roscia
, etc.) to supplement Caesar’s land law of 59 and to secure land for his troops when needed. Pompey gave some magnificent Games when his new stone theatre in the Campus Martius was dedicated, but these were too brutal and lavish for cultured minds, as Cicero told his friends. Then before the end of the year, amid tribunician obstruction, Crassus went off to Syria to seek military glory in a Parthian war (see below), while Pompey was left in control at Rome and could continue to attend to the corn supply.

Two events soon destroyed the triumvirate. In 54 one of the chief bonds between Pompey and Caesar snapped when Pompey’s wife, Julia, of whom he was really fond, died. When Caesar offered to renew the marriage alliance, Pompey declined and in 53 married Cornelia. Worse followed: in this same year came news of the disaster at Carrhae and the death of Crassus: another bridge, or buffer, between the two remaining triumvirs was gone. During these years disorder and corruption increased, and the future seemed to offer either anarchy or dictatorship. When 53 ended without consular elections having been held, men began to turn to Pompey, the more so when the gang-warfare culminated in the murder of Clodius by Milo: in the subsequent rioting his followers burned his body in the Senate House, which itself was burned down. The Senate declared martial law and gave Pompey as proconsul charge of a special levy.

If Pompey was going to assume unusual authority, he must take Caesar into consideration and so it was arranged that all ten tribunes should sponsor a bill to enable Caesar to stand for the consulship
in absentia
in order that he might step straight from his Gallic command into a consulship in Rome. Bibulus then proposed a bill which Cato supported and the Senate passed, that Pompey should be sole consul, i.e. consul without a colleague. He therefore now had consular and proconsular
imperium
, though only for a short time. As the trial of Milo for the murder of Clodius was approaching, Pompey carried two measures
de vi
and
de ambitu
which were applied retrospectively; they were probably not an indirect method of attacking Caesar, but were designed to facilitate the condemnation of Milo. Pompey was not yet completely reconciled with the Optimates, many of whom wanted to save Milo, and he had not made his final choice between them and Caesar. Cicero, who was defending Milo, for once in his forensic life, failed his client, intimidated in part by the troops with which Pompey had surrounded the court in order
to counter the demonstrations of Clodius’ supporters. Milo was condemned and went into exile at Massilia. When Cicero sent him a copy of the speech that he had meant to deliver, Milo ironically replied that he was glad the speech had not been made, since otherwise he would not have been enjoying the mullets of Massilia.

Pompey next carried two other measures. A law
de iure magistratuum
enacted that all candidates must appear in person. This may have been aimed at Caesar, but more probably the
privilegium
granted to him by the law of the ten tribunes would be valid against it; however, to avoid misunderstanding, Pompey personally added a clause to except Caesar. Pompey’s second measure confirmed a senatorial resolution of 53 and prescribed a five years’ interval between a magistracy and a promagistracy. This law, which superseded that of Gaius Gracchus (p. 30), may have been designed to check ambition and promote efficiency rather than to embarrass Caesar. It did, however, embarrass Cicero; since there was a shortage of available governors and he had not already held a proconsulship, he was reluctantly sent to Cilicia.
^25a
Nor did Pompey neglect his own interests: though in the course of the summer he took a consular colleague, his new father-in-law Metellus Scipio, he secured a continuation of his command in Spain for five years. As he took no corresponding action on Caesar’s behalf, this was clearly not in the spirit of the provincial arrangements agreed upon at Luca.

Meantime during 52 Caesar had weathered the storm of the revolt of Vercingetorix in Gaul and his campaigns were drawing to a successful conclusion. This will have stimulated the jealousy of Pompey and the apprehensions of the Optimates. Many of the latter therefore, men like Cato, Domitius Ahenobarbus, M. Brutus, the Metelli, Claudii Marcelli and Cornelii Lentuli, decided to turn to Pompey, even if not all of them approved of him. One of the consuls of 51, M. Marcellus, then moved to the attack. After securing the rejection of a request by Caesar that his command should be extended to the end of 49, he proposed that the Senate should consider the question of superseding Caesar on the ground that the Gallic war was over, and he challenged the validity of the law of the ten tribunes, though he met with tribunician vetoes. He then insulted Caesar by flogging a senator of Novum Comum as a demonstration that the town did not enjoy Roman citizenship when Caesar had been treating the Transpadanes as full citizens. Finally, he persuaded the Senate to agree that the possibility of a successor to Caesar should be discussed on 1 March 50.

To meet such attacks Caesar needed an agent in Rome and he secured the support of one of the tribunes of 50, a bankrupt young nobleman named C. Scribonius Curio, who promptly exercised his veto on 1 March.
²⁶
Not long afterwards, when news came of a Parthian threat to Syria, the Senate voted that Pompey and Caesar should each send a legion: Pompey weakened Caesar
by contributing a legion that he had lent in 53 to Caesar, who thus lost two; nor were the troops sent out of Italy, since better news came from the East. During the summer the consul C. Marcellus (cousin of the consul of 51) failed to persuade the Senate to compel Curio to withdraw his veto. Pompey remained undecided and outwardly ambiguous, and the year dragged on amid increasing apprehension of war. Then on 1 December Curio forced the Senate to vote on his proposal that both Caesar and Pompey should give up their commands and disarm: the motion was carried by 370 to 22 (such was the longing for peace), but it was promptly vetoed. The extreme Optimates refused to capitulate, and on the next day Marcellus asked Pompey to save the Republic and assume command of all forces in Italy. At last Pompey was driven to a decision: he accepted the call.

Caesar, who was in winter quarters near Ravenna, made several attempts to reach a compromise. M. Antony (tribune in 49) forced the consuls on 1 January 49 to read an offer from Caesar to implement Curio’s earlier disarmament proposal; the consuls, backed by Pompey, refused to allow a vote. Metellus Scipio proposed that Caesar should be declared a public enemy unless he laid down his arms before a certain day (this will have been 1 March, if that was the terminal date of his command; otherwise, if this had already gone by, e.g. 13 November 50, it will have been a date to be fixed); the proposal was passed but vetoed by Antony. Cicero, who had just arrived back from Cilicia, tried to negotiate, but in vain. On 7 January Antony and a fellow-tribune were warned to leave the Senate, which then passed the
senatus consultum ultimum
; they fled to Caesar. From Ravenna Caesar advanced to Ariminum: in doing so he cast his die, because between these cities flowed the Rubicon, a little stream that separated his province of Cisalpine Gaul from Italy. The Civil War had begun.

If the technical responsibility for war rested on the shoulders of Caesar, it was clearly desired neither by him (witness his negotiations), nor by Pompey (witness his vacillations), nor by the vast majority of senators (witness their vote of 1 December), and still less by the bulk of the population of Italy who showed no enthusiasm to rise in defence of the constitution. Caesar himself perhaps put his finger on the point when, surveying the Optimate dead on the battle-field of Pharsalus, he exclaimed, ‘Hoc voluerunt’. It was the small Optimate clique, the twenty-two senators who voted against disarmament, that forced the issue. Caesar had been compelled either to resort to force or go to Rome as a private citizen which would lead at least to political extinction and possibly to physical danger. The Optimate rump claimed to represent legitimate authority against a traitor, but their violation of the tribunician veto mocked their claims to legality. The hands of none of the leaders were spotless: behind them all gleamed the corrupting influence of power. No real principles were at stake. That was the tragedy. It was a struggle
for personal power, prestige and honour, without regard for the
libertas
of others. Caesar frankly admitted that ‘his
dignitas
had ever been dearer to him than life itself’. Of Pompey it was written: ‘occultior non melior’.
²⁷

The Parthian kingdom had been formed by a semi-nomadic people who moved into the Seleucid satrapy of Parthia in the mid-third century and gradually extended their rule from the Euphrates to the Indus, from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf, with their capital at Ecbatana. In their eastern expansion they were able to roll back a vast nomadic movement which had started when the Yueh-chi (or Tochari), driven out of N.W. China, had displaced on their march various tribes that were collectively called the Sacae. While the Yueh-chi overthrew the Greek kingdom in Bactria (Afghanistan), the Sacae broke into the Parthian province of Seistan (
c.
128), from which they were soon driven out and forced eastwards to India. With peace established, the Parthian king made contacts with west and east. His envoys met Sulla in 92 on the Euphrates (p. 62) and he received an embassy from the Chinese Han emperor which opened up for Parthia the caravan Silk Route from China through Chinese Turkestan. In overrunning Seleucid Babylonia, the Parthians became masters of a Greek kingdom, but though they took over Greek methods of administration and made use of Greek secretaries, Greek science, and the Greek language for trading purposes, they were not deeply affected by Greek culture. When they conquered these wide areas, the native population naturally remained basically the same: the Parthians formed a landowning aristocracy of king and feudal nobles. The language that they used was a form of Persian (Pahlavi), but they have left no literature behind, although Greek literature flourished in the East in the first century B.C.: a ‘History of Parthia’ was written by Apollodorus of Artemita in Parthia, and a description of the empire was given by Isodore of Charax in his ‘Parthian Stations’. It was rather in the art of war that the Parthians made original contributions. They relied primarily on cavalry, of two kinds. They bred a strong charger, on which the nobles fought as cataphracts, heavily mailed knights with huge spears. Besides these predecessors of the medieval knights, they employed horse-archers who were mounted on light horses and were armed with an asymmetrical bow, which they used with great skill in the ‘Parthian shot’ fired over the crupper as they pretended to flee. But though they had perhaps 6000 cataphracts and 40,000 horse-archers, the legionminded Romans did not appreciate their strength – before Crassus!

The earlier friendly relations of Parthia with Rome were undermined by the folly of Pompey (p. 87) and by Gabinius, who as proconsul of Syria in 55 gave temporary support to a rebel brother of King Orodes II who had just
come to the throne. It was the Romans, however, that turned to war. Crassus wanted a military reputation to balance that of his triumviral colleagues. Leaving Rome before the end of his consular year, he advanced with seven legions into Mesopotamia in 54, where he gained some success. Hoping to get some cavalry from his Armenian ally Artavasdes, he returned to the attack in 53. Orodes himself covered Armenia, and entrusted the defence of Mesopotamia to a member of the noble Suren family, a general of no mean ability. When Crassus gathered that Suren (his personal name is unknown) was in the desert east of the Euphrates, he decided to leave the protection of the river and march against the Parthian force: for this move he has sometimes been blamed, but he has also been justified on the ground that if his objective was Seleucia, he would at some time have had to risk crossing open country.

After a hard march the Romans reached a tributary of the Euphrates near Carrhae when Crassus learnt that the Parthians were on them. He formed his men into a square, and sent out a covering force of Gallic cavalry which his son Publius had brought from Caesar in Gaul. But in vain: Publius’ men were overwhelmed. Meantime the main body was trying to stand up to the showers of Parthian arrows, which were discharged both straight and low and ‘lobbed’ in from above, so that the legionaries soon discovered that a shield could not cover both body and head. Those that survived, endured patiently, knowing that the enemy’s ammunition must soon run out. But here they reckoned without the genius of Suren, who had organized a special corps of 1000 Arabian camels, one for every ten men, which brought up almost limitless supplies of arrows. After dark Crassus, who failed to risk a night attack on the enemy and their tired horses, abandoned 4000 wounded and retired to Carrhae. Without adequate provisions and deserted by his quaestor Cassius (later Caesar’s murderer), he was forced by his demoralized troops to treat with the enemy. Though he knew he was riding into a trap, he met the Parthians, only to be cut down. Some 10,000 survivors ultimately reached Syria, while a like number were settled as prisoners by the Parthians at Merv (Alexandria) in Margiane not far from the Oxus.

The Parthians advanced again to the Euphrates, but an attack on Syria was delayed by the fact that Orodes suspected that Suren might be dangerously successful and had him killed. When they did invade Syria (51), they were soon driven out by Cassius. At Rome civil war distracted attention from the East, and Parthia did not renew her attacks. She was content with the result of Carrhae and with the legionary eagles that she had captured and was to keep for thirty years.
²⁸